Movie: The Lathe of Heaven (1980)
Sci-Fi Story Features Ultimate What-If Dreams Vs. Reality Scenario
Aug 1, 2008
The story, by acclaimed novelist Ursula K. Le Guin, poses a simple question: What if a person’s dreams could change all reality?
The Power of Dreams
In the near future, sweetly passive George Orr is sent to a state-sanctioned psychiatrist, after abusing his legal prescriptions in order to avoid sleep. George is afraid to dream, insisting to Dr. Haber that his dreams retroactively change all reality.
Dr. Haber’s scientific creation, the Augmentor, reveals that, in fact, George is quite correct.
Unbeknownst to George, Haber gradually tries to mold George’s dreams – in order to change the world, to make it closer to Haber’s own ideals.
But remember Robert Burns: “The best laid plans of mice and men…”
George’s “vivid” dreams – the ones that change reality retroactively – invariably go awry, due to a combination of both George’s naivete and his Eastern-influenced resistance to Haber’s notions of social and environmental engineering. During all this, Haber’s own motives remain unclear but gradually grow more sinister.
Along the way, George falls in love with a civil rights lawyer who tries to help him. And he must continually try to win her anew in each succeeding incarnation of reality.
Social Engineering at Heart of Story
This is a complex and layered story that works on many levels – as a romance, as dire Malthusian warning, allegory, meditations on war, race relations and ultimately on mankind’s rights and role in the universe.
Bruce Davison is terrific as George Orr, seemingly passive but whose fight to let the world rise or fall on its own is eventually heroic. The versatile Davison has worked mostly in television, although his feature credits include X-Men and Longtime Companion.
Echoes of Vertigo
Margaret Avery, who went on to do The Color Purple, is very effective as Heather Lelache, the hardened public defender and civil rights lawyer. Seeing her soften toward George in alternate realities is a sly commentary on how men try to change women; Hitchcock’s Vertigo springs immediately to mind.
And in a bravura performance, Kevin Conway is Haber, the ambitious doctor whose motives seem to shift as much as the fabric of reality.
This was the first film PBS ever developed. Neophyte co-directors David Loxton and Fred Barzyk acquitted themselves respectably, and Director of Photography Robbie Greenberg did yeoman’s work on a reported budget of just a quarter million dollars. Only one special effect – that of a flying saucer – appears hokey and unreal. The moody and atmospheric score is by Michael Small; Diane English (Murphy Brown) and Roger Swaybill co-wrote the teleplay.
Beatles Song Swapped
The movie vanished from PBS for more than 20 years, due to legal squabbling -- much of it concerning music rights. At last it was digitally re-mastered and released a few years ago on DVD by New Video. Sadly, though, the Beatles’ recording of With A Little Help From My Friends had been replaced with a cover version. The song provided important linkage both in the novel and in the film, and the Beatles' original carried more gravitas in a key scene than its replacement.
Nonetheless, the 1980 film is head and shoulders above a ruinously reworked 2002 cable remake starring James Caan as Haber.
In many ways, The Lathe of Heaven is a thinking person’s morality play. But what once seemed like a flight of sci-fi fancy today seems no less frightening, but somehow, given global warming and other 21st Century terrors, not quite surprising.
